- Statements from political leaders saying “the correct number of civilian casualties is zero” would mean don’t fight a war. This is the first war I’ve ever observed where not only did people believe there could be a daily civilian casualty count, but they took the word of a terrorist organization on what it would be and just started parroting a terrorist organization’s numbers, which is the exact strategy that they want, in order to get the world, the UN, and U.S. to force Israel to be defeated.
- Israel was condemned for the use of a 2,000-pound bomb in an urban area. The U.S. used over 15,000 in the first Gulf War, because it’s a very standard military munition to hit an enemy in a bunker underground. When Israel is following every rule that’s ever been thought of, and implementing ones that nobody’s tried, it then gets told that, well, you’ve got to find a different way.
- If you ban the use of bombs in urban combat, then you’re going to see a lot more urban combat around the world, because a weaker force will say, look, all I have to do is get into the urban area and you can’t touch me unless you come in here, and I turn it into a meat grinder where you lose tens of thousands of soldiers and I achieve my political goals. This double, triple standard that Israel is being held to will come back to bite the world in the future.
- Israel waited over three weeks after October 7th to allow civilians to leave. And the world said, well, you can’t do that. You can’t evacuate a million people out of northern Gaza and into southern Gaza, into the Al-Mawasi humanitarian zone. Israel did this for over 850,000, which is 85% of the population. Israel handed out maps of safe areas to help evacuate the civilians. No military in the world has ever handed out maps. This also telegraphed the IDF’s moves to Hamas. They also used advanced technologies, flying drones with speakers, using cell phone presence to know where the civilian presence was and then not going into those areas until they’ve been evacuated.
- Everybody gave Israel advice on the way to bring the hostages home. Don’t launch a ground invasion. Just use raids. Look, I know it’ll take you a few years to get your hostages home, but just use raids and strategic strikes to take out Hamas leadership. That’s anti-historical, it has never happened. No military has ever been successful in doing something like that. Hamas spent years developing an environment with the sole purpose to get civilians killed if Israel ever entered that environment.
- What would America have done in the same situation? Gen. Mark Milley, former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said, We would have used overwhelming military force to achieve our objectives of bringing our people home and securing our borders and protecting our nation as quickly as possible. Step one would be ensuring not a single rocket emanated out of enemy territory, headed towards our civilian areas like Los Angeles. Gen. Milley has been very vocal, saying we would have used overwhelming force, immediate force.
- I’m a researcher, and what the case studies show is that failing to do this will result in a protracted war and increased suffering. All of these groups who want to limit the suffering of war have in this case increased the suffering, not because of Israel, but because of Hamas and international pressure. The way Israel was forced to execute this campaign has caused hostages to stay in captivity longer. This way has caused civilians to die. This way has caused civilian suffering.
Maurice Hirsch: Welcome to the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs War Room update. We are over 260 days into the war with the terrorists in Gaza. It started on the October 7, 2023, with the murder of 1200 people and the taking of over 250 hostages into Gaza.
Today we’re joined by Major John Spencer, who’s the Chair of Urban Warfare Studies at the Modern War Institute at West Point. Could we have your impressions of what’s actually going on on the ground in Gaza.
John Spencer: What’s going on the ground is a very restrained use of force to achieve the goals set by Israel in Gaza. Within the political context of the world that Israel lives in, where they’re held to a double standard, if not a triple standard. Actually, based on my research of over a decade of urban warfare. Israel is held to a standard that doesn’t exist, a standard that no military has ever followed.
As Israel launched the operation to achieve its goals to bring the hostages home, to remove Hamas from power, to dismantle their military, and to secure the border, I knew that Israel used very strong restraints – from evacuating cities to the use of munitions.
Basically, everything that’s been said about the IDF has actually been the opposite of what I’ve observed in reality – to include frontline forces, their demeanor, the restraints on the use of force that all militaries impose, the use of tactics that no military has ever tried in order to prevent civilian harm, and doing the job despite the constraints of the world – where statements from political leaders say things like, “the correct number of civilian casualties is zero.” That would mean don’t fight the war.
This is also the first war I’ve ever observed in my long history as a both as a serviceman in the U.S. Army and as a student where not only did people believe there could be a daily civilian casualty count, but they took the word of a terrorist organization on what it would be and just started parroting a terrorist organization’s numbers, which is the exact strategy that they want, in order to get the world, the United Nations, United States, to force Israel to be defeated.
Hamas wants Israel to be forced to accept a Hamas victory. If anybody thought that Hamas was going to give up the hostages or conduct a unilateral surrender or disarmament, that’s just foolish, based on Hamas’s history, let alone war.
I’ve picked apart every allegation from the use of starvation as a form of war, indiscriminate bombing, all these libels, or genocide. It’s more than just a misunderstanding of the laws of war. It is because it’s Israel. I am very concerned that the standards that the world are trying to apply would then become a standard not just against terrorism but in war in general.
I think the use of bombs in urban areas is one of the examples where Israel was condemned for the use of a 2,000-pound bomb in an urban area, despite it being a very heavily used munition in past wars. The United States used over 15,000 in the first Gulf War, over 5000 in the invasion of Iraq in less than a month, because it’s a very standard military munition to hit an enemy in a bunker underground. The U.S. used 35,000 artillery rounds in a five-month battle in Raqqa, Syria.
We know Hamas built its whole strategy to use its tunnels and to continue to go at a deeper depth. So you couldn’t get to them. And then they put people on top of them, civilians that they want to sacrifice. But there’s been this growing interest in the human rights community to ban the use of all bombs, missiles, mortars, artillery in urban areas, period. Then they said, how dare you use a munition of that size in an urban area, even if you’ve evacuated all the civilians.
We still, because of the moral values of our nation, follow the laws of war and the application of force in war. But if this is the standard – well, you can’t do that. You can’t go into a city unless you’ve evacuated it – all of these would actually have huge implications to the point where nations can’t wage war.
The laws of war were put in to put limits on the brutality of war, especially the Geneva Conventions after World War Two. We’re never going to indiscriminately bomb civilians to try to force their leadership to give up the will to fight. But when Israel is following every rule that’s ever been thought of, and implementing ones that nobody’s tried, it then gets told that, well, you’ve got to find a different way.
If you ban the use of bombs in urban combat, then you’re going to see a lot more urban combat around the world, because a weaker force will say, look, all I have to do is get into the urban area and you can’t touch me unless you come in here, and I turn it into a meat grinder where you lose tens of thousands of soldiers and I achieve my political goals. This double, triple standard that Israel is being held to will come back to bite the world in the future.
The human rights activist groups do great work. But their actual agenda is to prevent all war. And if you ban war, again, there’s a long history of trying to put limits on war, which has actually led to more destruction.
The invasion of Israel that happened was an act of war of Hamas. Israel, in accordance with the UN Charter, article 51, responded in self-defense. This war is the first time in history that I’ve ever seen where one side – not the Nazis, not the Japanese, not even ISIS – did things to get their entire population killed and says that’s how they want to achieve their political goals.
If you’re going to say that Western militaries should follow these laws we all agreed to, but here are some additional things that you need to follow, including “Don’t fight in urban areas,” it’s going to be very problematic for the future of all nations.
When I say that Israel is being held to a standard that nobody else is following, this is because the experts who are criticizing Israel’s operations in this war are using a standard called the Civilian Harm Mitigation guidelines, which were created over the last 20 years through best practices of commanders on the ground in Afghanistan and Iraq during counterinsurgency and counter-terror operations.
It’s a collection of those practices that have actually never been implemented in totality. It’s a best practice. Like if you can, do these things. Even evacuating cities isn’t what you do in an invasion of another territory. That’s not what we did in invading Panama, invading Iraq, invading Afghanistan.
The whole purpose of war is to end it quickly so that it does limit the suffering of the populations that are caught in between. You do it with overwhelming force, surprise and speed. But this is a hangover from the war on terrorism, the counterterrorism, counterinsurgency period.
Hamas has learned from wars with Israel in 2008, 2014, 2021, that they need to go deeper with their tunnels, making it more of a challenge to get to them because their goal is not to fight. Their goal is just to wait the Israelis out until the international community stops Israel and tells them they can’t go another step, which has happened in the past.
Hamas is not an insurgency. Hamas has governed Gaza for 15 years. It’s not a state. They had all administrative control, built a massive military base, squandered billions of dollars instead of improving the lives of the Palestinian people in Gaza to build this terror military complex.
So the idea of even applying these standards, first. Okay, don’t go in with amazing speed to overwhelm the enemy and make them believe that they shouldn’t resist because they’ve lost the will to fight, which is the goal of war.
Israel waited over three weeks after October 7th to allow civilians to leave. And the world said, well, you can’t do that. You can’t evacuate a million people out of northern Gaza and into southern Gaza, into the Al-Mawasi humanitarian zone. They said you couldn’t and Israel effectively did for over 850,000, which is like 85% of the population. Even in a counterinsurgency war, that would be a very high standard of success of evacuating the civilians, then launched their ground invasion. And then Israel started handing out maps of safe areas to help evacuate the civilians. No military in the world has ever handed out maps.
The IDF handed out their maps to the civilians and to Hamas, and telegraphed every move they were making. They also used advanced technologies, flying drones with speakers, using cell phone presence to know where the civilian presence was and then not going into those areas until they’ve been evacuated.
Counterinsurgency operations are different. One of the differences is time. So everybody gave Israel advice on the way to do it, on the way to bring the hostages home. Don’t launch a ground invasion. Just use raids. Look, I know it’ll take you a few years to get your hostages home, but just use raids and strategic strikes to take out Hamas leadership. That’s anti- historical, it has never happened. No military has ever been successful in doing something like that. So why would you think that would be working? It’s crazy, right? It’s not even a double standard. It’s like a standard that doesn’t exist. It’s never been in place, to include, don’t use any munition that will reach somebody in a bunker. Go send your soldiers in to be sacrificed. And don’t strike the enemy before you get there with a military munition, even if the city is empty of people. They literally are saying, don’t use those munitions in a city, even if you’ve emptied the entire city of people, even if you’ve done everything you can to mitigate civilian harm.
There’s never been a war in the history of humans where there’s been zero civilian casualties. Yes, we’ve created all kinds of things to limit civilian casualties. But Hamas spent years developing an environment with the sole purpose to get civilians killed if Israel ever entered that environment. Then there are all the libels of Israel not helping with the humanitarian crisis, when the UN has a thousand trucks are sitting at the Kerem Shalom crossing right now and the UN says, it’s not safe enough for us to deliver it, and there are armed groups taking the aid, so we’re just not going to do it.
It’s very problematic, and not just for Israel, because if this was another country with somebody telling them, hey, look, what you’re doing there, you can’t keep doing that. You need to find a different way to achieve your goals. Legitimate goals. We all recognize it. It’s a just war. Those are legitimate goals. But you need to find a different way. Well, what are your recommendations? Well, just don’t do it.
What would America have done in the same situation if somebody had just invaded our borders and taken hundreds of hostages, and started bombarding with 4,000 rockets launched on October 7th and 9,000 more since then?
General Mark Milley, who was Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff for two presidents, said, what do you think I would have recommended to the U.S. president for us to do? We would have used overwhelming military force to achieve our objectives of bringing our people home and securing our borders and protecting our nation as quickly as possible.
Step one would be ensuring not a single rocket emanated out of enemy territory, headed towards our civilian areas like Los Angeles. General Milley has been very vocal, saying, of course, we would have used overwhelming force, immediate force. We have multiple divisions within a few hours of readiness that would have launched immediately to achieve our goals.
I’m a researcher, and what the case studies show is that failing to do this will result in a protracted war and increased suffering. All of these groups who want to limit the suffering of war have in this case increased the suffering, not because of Israel, but because of Hamas and international pressure.
The number of civilian deaths reported by Hamas is a lie, is not accurate. There are not that many civilian casualties. But some of them are because of the way you forced Israel to execute this campaign. This way has caused hostages to stay in captivity longer. This way has caused civilians to die. This way has caused civilian suffering. The problem with applying this to the future is that you would increase the brutality of war.
There has never been a case like this where they’re taking the word of a terrorist organization, who admittedly will not tell you if any of the casualty numbers they are providing are actual combatants, individuals partaking in the hostilities. In the recent hostage rescue operation that Israel did, the world immediately started reporting on the numbers of civilians killed. If you’re a civilian holding a hostage, you’re partaking in the hostilities and you are not a part of the numbers of civilians. You’re no longer so.
The numbers that have been announced by Hamas do not count for a single combatant or a person partaking in the hostilities. I’ve never seen a war or a battle where somebody asked during the war, what’s the civilian to combatant ratio? It’s never been done, especially in urban combat where there is this mixing of civilians and combatants, when combatants are using human shields, and Hamas is using them for human sacrifice, literally saying they want as many of them to die as possible and acting to fulfill that. I’ve never seen anybody take a terrorist’s word for the number of casualties.
They use these numbers to wage libels against Israel, that they’re intentionally causing civilian harm, when every bit of evidence shows that they are doing the opposite. They’re trying to prevent civilian harm despite Hamas’s actions. In past wars, it was months, if not years, after an urban battle that they developed what the civilian death toll was.
ISIS was an insurgency in Iraq, holding territory that it was allowed to hold it for two years and built up its defenses. In the 2016-17 battle in Mosul, it was a year later that they came up with a number of civilian casualties which ranged from 10,000 to 40,000. Nobody in the moment was saying, hey, ISIS, how many civilians have died inside the city? That just crazy. And if somebody thinks that’ll be the standard for the next war, that when the war begins, you can ask what’s the civilian death toll right now? It’s impossible. There’s nobody who could ever do that.
All these laws of war, like hospitals are protected, for Israel has become, hospitals are untouchable, which is literally a vignette of the problematic misapplication of what the law actually says. What Hamas has done in convincing the world that these things are legal and mass media propagates those despite what’s actually happening on the ground, even if it’s not a. law. There’s so many things that people believe are laws that aren’t laws, like the fact that hospitals were untouchable.
Now hospitals are very protected and Hamas used every hospital in Gaza for military purposes, on purpose, because it’s a highly protected area where you’re required by law to announce to the enemy who’s using it to stop using it, and then take all precautions to prevent the harm to the wounded, to the medical staff, which Israel did. People have asked me, is that right? Is Israel violating the laws of war? No, they’re actually going above and beyond all the laws of war.
People don’t understand. Hamas is not trying to defeat the IDF. Hamas’s strategy, which the world has fallen into, is to convince the world that Israel is doing something wrong and that there is this great misbelief on what Israel is actually doing, and that all the suffering will just stop if Israel stops. No. the suffering for the Palestinian people will increase and will continue because Hamas says they don’t care about their own people.
This is the crazy world we live in where Israel has had to justify its right to defend itself. There’s a failure to recognize that while people say they don’t want another front, the fact is that Hezbollah began viciously attacking Israel in an act of war on October 8th and has launched thousands of rockets, drones, mortars, artillery at Israel to where 80-100,000 citizens are homeless for over eight months. Any other nation would find that unacceptable, but Israel has to justify its right to defend itself. This is the point where we’re at, where we continue to say, we don’t want escalation. Nobody wants a second front. But then, put pressure on the other party attacking Israel to stop doing that.
Israel has had to make very hard decisions about what it would need to defend itself against Hizbullah, a much greater threat than Hamas, with over 100,000 advanced munitions, over 100,000 rockets and missiles. The world says, well, figure out a way to make them stop. But don’t launch a self-defense war. I think it’s very problematic. I think Israel has tried every means, especially diplomatic and signaling, preparations to defend themselves, trying to convince the other combatant, in this case, Hizbullah, who is Iran’s cherry of a proxy since they’re all Iranian-backed proxies, as Iran pursues its grand strategy for the Middle East.
But this is the dilemma, and we don’t even have time to talk about Iran, a state actor attacking Israel during the midst of all of this, with a massive barrage to cause massive harm to civilians with over 300 cruise missiles, ballistic missiles, and drones on April 13th, while this is all happening, and all the pressure is on Israel to do things a certain way and to not escalate things while it’s being attacked by so many enemies, all at once. That would be unacceptable to any other nation of the world.
In some ways, everybody’s fallen into the Hamas strategy of trying to force Israel to not achieve its goals, to not remove Hamas from power, to not bring their hostages home immediately, and to not respond to Hizbullah. But every nation’s primary goal is survival and the protection of its population, to include just the immediate but the grander picture.
I don’t know what’s going to happen in the North, but I can tell you from logical military analysis that the current status cannot continue. The fact that it’s been allowed to continue thus far is very unfortunate for the Israeli people, but it cannot continue that Hizbullah attacks northern Israel at a massive cost to the Israeli nation, and that 100,000 Israelis are homeless.
I think Israel is absolutely winning the war, but I can’t tell you if they’re going to win the war. I think they’re achieving the military goals systematically. Despite all the constraints, the IDF are doing amazing things that blew my mind when I visited the forces in Gaza, and what they’ve been able to achieve despite the constraints put on them by the international community.
Just like Israel has in the past done the unachievable, things that people can’t even imagine, the IDF and Israel have found a way, despite the constraints, to not lose against Hamas, to continue to put military pressure to systematically dismantle its military capabilities in Gaza, things that people thought would never be possible and at great cost to Israel and the IDF. They’ve figured out a way to do the unimaginable. They need to continue that because they’re close to dismantling Hamas’s military capability.
I’ll leave you with one comment. The innovations of Israel and the IDF will save the lives of Americans in the future, from their approach to active protection systems on their vehicles, to how to deal with tunnel warfare, to how to preserve and protect civilians in combat, it will save lives in the future. Just like their innovations after the Yom Kippur War, how they did the unthinkable, changed the entire U.S. military land doctrine. It will save lives in the future. So that’s, for me, another reason why I do what I do. Because I know the amazing things that the IDF are doing will save lives around the world in the future.
John Spencer is Chair of Urban Warfare Studies at the Modern War Institute at West Point
